The future of SkyOS, the closed-source alternative operating system, had been hangingby a thread for a long time now. Barely any releases, until they came to a grinding halt altogether and Robert Szeleney explained he was pondering the future of SkyOS, and where to take it from here. One of the main problems was a lack of driver support which really made development difficult. Well, this is a problem Szeleney might be able to fix.

Yes there are handfuls of kernels SkyOS could use but seriously, for the best hardware support Robert cannot go past a Linux Kernel.

Just going to the Linux kernel isn't going to get you support for all the hardware a Linux distro supports. All of the support for hardware graphics acceleration lives in the X server. You could include the X.org, but then you're well on your way to just being another Linux distribution. There's DirectFB, but it doesn't support nearly as much hardware.

I believe USB hotplug support requires some userland support as well.

The Linux kernel does give you support for lots of other hardware, though at least for a while FreeBSD had better WiFi support (or so I heard, I've never messed around with WiFi on FreeBSD personally).

All of the support for hardware graphics acceleration lives in the X server. You could include the X.org, but then you're well on your way to just being another Linux distribution. There's DirectFB, but it doesn't support nearly as much hardware.

Nor does it support any of the extra features of the hardware, like acceleration or such.

I believe USB hotplug support requires some userland support as well.

The kernel can handle loading any necessary modules automatically, you only need userland if the hardware requires any extra operations. Though, just having the driver up isn't much..

The Linux kernel does give you support for lots of other hardware

There's still a huge streak of work to do to be able to use much of it, though.